


One Slip

by trsh



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-12
Updated: 2015-10-12
Packaged: 2018-04-26 00:51:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4983520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trsh/pseuds/trsh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You never seem to ever know the fine details of what got you stuck in the middle of nowhere, trying to help everyone else out so badly. You do know, however, that it happened. You know this because it keeps happening, over, and over, and over again. [SPOILERS: The Man Who Speaks In Hands]</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Slip

**Author's Note:**

> WARNING: I ended up lifting a lot of stuff from my own personal PTSD for this without actually meaning to. OOPS. I don't pretend to know if my experiences are similar to others, but if thinking about that sort of thing gets you panicky, you probably shouldn't read this.
> 
> This is the first thing I've written out for public consumption since I was in my early-teens. There's a couple of awkward bits, but I don't mind this piece for now.

_One slip._

It’s funny, to think about that, so long past. You know how easily one mistake can change so much, to be certain, but you never really think of them as unfixable. While you seem to mess up regularly, to most—perhaps you woke up a bit too late, maybe you’re seemingly lazing about all the time—but you have solutions for that. A stroke of the willpower, an emotional presence here or there—and suddenly, you’re wherever the hell you feel like being. Really, the only reason you seem to be bothered to walk anymore is because you think it’s a good idea. You always tell Papyrus that the townsfolk are getting to you, talking like you’re “ _a bit chubby_ ”, like you even have any way of storing fat within those bones…

 _Nah. Honestly, it just seems like it’d creep people out._ For the most part, you like the people around the Underground, and they seem to find you to be fun to be around. People know you’re a bit weird ( _and a bit shady_ , after dunking everyone at the local Grillby’s-sponsored spider-cider drinking competition, _with some, uh, odd tricks_ ) but you’d rather them see you as a quirky kind of weird, rather than the kind that can stab you in the back when nobody else is looking. God, you’ve never want to hurt a single soul, you’re just… pre-occupied quite regularly in your own thoughts. But, again, it’s a convenient tool to have. You never care about doing anything, anyways, it’s just something else that ensures you don’t even have to care about sleep schedules.

But… _that one slip_. Every single time you think you can toss it out of your mind, to continue on with your day and make people laugh, when all you want to do is tell some shitty jokes and have a good time, it comes back. Again, and again and _again_. You try to force yourself out of public view, when it comes right back, feelings like it just happened, like it never stopped happening, that it’d just repeated into your skull that _he’s gone, he’s gone and it was you, your fault, holding your eyes back again and again and again and again and again and again and_ \--

…Wait a second. Weren’t you about 20 meters to the left a couple of seconds ago? You don’t recall moving.

…The kid saw you. _Shit_.

 

* * *

 

 

You’d think, for all the reminiscing over it, that you’d remember more specifics of what happened that day. You remember odd specifics here and there; you woke up with an incredibly sore back, because the beds weren’t what you were used to. You remember an odd feeling of the room, too damp to deal with, and you recall the first thought you had, word-by-word:

_Yeesh, where’s some warm sunlight when ya need it? …Wait, the sun couldn’t be here. Right._

You don’t recall a time where you saw the sun. You know, very vividly, what it looked and felt like, though. You know that it was a pretty massive, orange-yellowish… ball. _Thing_. It was way up high in the air, so high nobody else could get to it. It radiated light from it, light so bright that some would complain if they stared at it for too long. That light was hot, much hotter than the cold, blue crystals that fill the caverns in the Underground. But it was never too hot to you, it was always warm and alive, and it always made you feel so… comfortable. You loved to lie back on a chair, right next to some water ( _presumably, like the river, but, uh… bigger?_ ), and simply lay there for hours.

You had to have seen it before, right? You mean, there’s some vague descriptions of it in the textbooks around here, but they all seem to have… odd depictions of it. At one point, the Myths to the Surface describes it as a “mass ball of fire with spikes”. _Why’d a sun ever need spikes?_

You remember having a hotdog for lunch. Not like, “having” having, just… keeping it around you. Getting food just seems to be the thing everyone else does, from what you’ve noticed, so it’s a reasonable memory. Plus, all the good places to hang out (at least, from what you recall in the underground) tends to involve some type of food. _Every other kind of food is a bit weird and mushy, y’know? But a plain hotdog on a bun is as clean and simple as you can get_.

You remember being told to go somewhere. Never been there before, so you opted to walk. You stopped by… _a place_. You know it was in the Waterfall. You check sometimes, just in the hopes that it was actually there. _Right in between a long hall of nothing, a gap where there seems you could fit a cozy home in the wall. Nothing too big that you’d want to live in it forever, but…_ _a shack, of sorts_. It’s never there. Of course it’s never there.

And then, you remember… walking. _Somewhere dangerous_? The vagueness grows as it progresses, more details seem to slip by as you move forward in the memory. _Cold_. Energy as much as a sun, but cold regardless. _Reading and marking on something, something with letters_. Didn’t watch your step, and… _slip. One slip, one fall. Tripped…_ somebody. You grit your teeth. Every time you think about that somebody, you get angry at yourself. Who the hell’s the “somebody”? They had to have mattered. Your mind spirals, filled with regret and depression, like an endless fog that you think you can run through, but you get tired, so tired, and you try to get to the end... but nothing came. No memories, no names, not even something as simple as a shape, or a concept.

_They fell. One slip, and they fell. Far, far down, where nobody could save them._

It was your fault. You know this much. You don’t know them anymore, nobody knows them. When you tried to explain it to Papyrus, he'll tell you that he kind of remembers that, day, too, going into great detail about the kind of spaghetti he was thinking of that day, followed by a vague “SOME TIME AND SPACE THING?????”. You assumed that he was just dreaming something odd. At the very least, it sounded entirely unrelated. Did it even happen? _Maybe I’m just overthinking this._ And then, you recall the badge. _Found a key one day, hidden underneath a pile._ Despite having no prior knowledge of any extra keys, you immediately knew where it went to.

 _Found a badge. A big old piece of junk, hidden under a tarp._ You brought it up one day to the scientist, she tend to know science junk, and even she was stumped. It’s not as if she doesn’t have the blueprints, as they came with the junk, but it’s unreadable. _Some miserable catscratch, using hands and skulls as code._ Whatever it is, it was well-hidden.

You didn’t mention one thing to her, though. Some photos. There’s you in them. And then there’s… people. You can’t ever remember them. You’ve stared at them for hours on end, and the second you look away, they ceased to exist. You want to mention it to others, but… it seems to slip you by every time. At the same time, you’ve also noticed people passing you by through town as you kept looking at it, and nobody paid a single mind, as if it doesn’t even exist to them.

Those memories have to be real. _The gap with the “somebody”, the blank spot…_ you can’t even pretend you acknowledged anyone on there, but you know they’re there, right?

And you know it happened. Because it never stops happening in your mind. It happens again. _And again, and_ … You smack yourself in the head. _Shut up._ It’s not exactly the world’s most foolproof tactic, but it works when you catch yourself early enough.

You know, also, that you caused the result. That gap in your mind, memories that you can’t even acknowledge with a straight face, even despite not being able to comprehend them… that started from you. And the worst part is, you’re likely to never find out _why_. Any clue results in brainwash, any footing of reality ends in misery. It always does.

 

* * *

 

You’re honestly sort of numb to the fact, right now. It’s a nice feeling, to numb out everything that terrifies you, because it means you can at least try and delve more into it, without the fog inevitably overtaking you. There’s a lot to think about, a lot of things that happened over the course of today. _Granted, a normal day involves doing nothing at all, heh._

 _Woke up as tired as ever, kept getting pestered by the bro_. Papyrus keeps talking to you about the flower he’s been meeting in strange places. Always the same topic every morning, but there’s worse to discuss, you suppose. _Says the flower’s kind to him, encouraged him to keep searching for humans_. Sounds like the standard mindless dream, but at least it was mildly positive, much better than yours by leaps and bounds. _But that’s not all, he says. The flower also said that he’d be absolutely sure to find a human today_. _Absolutely sure, Sans!_ Some motivation to keep him happy, which is good… until you realized that he was never dreaming it, and it wasn’t just motivation.

You couldn’t ever bring yourself to lay a finger on the kid that came out of that door, though, and lucky for them, you knew that your brother couldn’t either, even if he tried his hardest. And as much as Asgore loved to thump around that humans only know the woes of violence, this kid seems to genuinely prefer helping everyone out.

  _“Determination”, is the word Alphys likes to throw around_. A purely human-soul quality, that allows for a certain amount of willpower to override all other concepts of magic and science… one that guarantees survival, no matter the insurmountable odds. _So long as they believed hard enough, she says, they can’t ever lose, regardless of the scenario._ To be honest, you do feel a slight tinge of jealousy about it, but you’d rather sweep it off before it gets too big. You’ve given up long ago when it comes to your will to find out the truth, and you’d likely just lose it immediately.

You were confused the first time you saw that kid, to be honest. It felt as if you met that kid before, like you were old buddies and you would hang out and eat together. To ensure that the worm would never even think about leaving the skull, you also noticed that they acted similarly. _They just turned around, shook the hand like it was nothing_. They don’t seem to have bad intent, because if they were killing up everyone, maybe you’d have more suspicions, but they just seem to want to be nice and get out.

 _…”Some time and space thing_ ”. The phrase rings back into your head. Come to think of it, the kid seems to have not only grasped the basics around here, but they’ve seemingly already delved into a lot of the odd quirks and secrets that you’d think would require an incredible amount of knowledge. And while there’s always a chance that Papyrus just happened to have a coincidentally accurate dream, there’s still a lot of people coming around recently that just so happens to predict the future and respond with quick accuracy.

 _…Again. And again._ Seemingly every mention of time ticks something inside you, the same feeling that cracks you so regularly to quickly-hidden panics. Maybe you won’t ever know the full story… but there’s a simple trigger to start out with, that could mean quite a lot: Time.


End file.
